IfI may judge by the statements of the few friends who gathered round me, the outcry of the period to which I allude was beyond all precedent, all parallel, even in those cases where political motives have sharpened slander and doubled enmity. I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest 1 should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure, my most intimate friend told me afterwards, that he was under apprehensions of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage. However, I was not deterred by these counsels from seeing Kean in his best characters, nor from voting according to my principles; and with regard to the third and last apprehensions of my friends, I could not share in them, not being made acqainted with their extent till some time after I had crossed the Channel. Even if I had been so, I am not of a nature to be much affected by men's anger, though I may feel hurt by their aversion. Against all individual outrage, I could protect or redress myself; and against that of a crowd, I should probably have been enabled to defend myself, with the assistance of others, as has been done on similar occasions. with precisely that importance which a Whig vote possesses in these Tory days, and with such personal acquaintance with the leaders in both houses as the society in which I lived sanctioned, but without claim or expectation of any thing like friendship from any one, except a few young men of my own age and standing, and a few others more advanced in life, which last it had been my fortune to serve in circumstances of difficulty. This was, in fact, to stand alone: and I recollect, some time after, Madame de Staël said to me in Switzerland, "You should not have warred with the world—it will not do-it is too strong always for any individual: I myself once tried it in early life, but it will not do." I perfectly acquiesce in the truth of this remark; but the world had done me the honour to begin the war; and, assuredly, if peace is only to be obtained by courting and paying tribute to it, I am not qualified to obtain its countenance. I thought, in the words of Campbell, "Then wed thee to an exiled lot, And if the world hath loved thee not, Its absence may be borne." served that some of those who were now eagerly laying the axe to my roof-tree, might see their own shaken, and feel a portion of what they had in I recollect, however, that, having been much hurt by Romilly's conduct (he having a general reI retired from the country, perceiving that I was tainer for me, had acted as adviser to the adversary, the object of general obloquy; I did not indeed alleging, on being reminded of his retainer, that imagine, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, that all man-he had forgotten it, as his clerk had so many), I obkind was in a conspiracy against me, though I had perhaps as good grounds for a such a chimera as ever he had but I perceived that I had to a great extent become personally obnoxious in England,flicted.-His fell, and crushed him. perhaps through my own fault, but the fact was in- I have heard of, and believe, that there are human disputable; the public in general would hardly beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; have been so much excited against a more popular but I believe that the best mode to avoid taking character, without at least an accusation or a charge vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation. of some kind actually expressed or substantiated, I hope that I may never have the opportunity, for for I can hardly conceive that the common and every. I am not quite sure that I could resist it, having day occurrence of a separation between man and wife derived from my mother something of the "percould in itself produce so great a ferment. Ishall fervidum ingenium Scotorum." I have not say nothing of the usual complaints of being "pre-sought, and shall not seek it, and perhaps it may judged," "condemned unheard," "unfairness," never come in my path. I do not in this allude to "partiality," and so forth, the usual changes rung the party, who might be right or wrong; but to by parties who have had, or are to have, a trial; but many who made her cause the pretext of their own I was a little surprised to find myself condemned bitterness. She, indeed, must have long avenged without being favoured with the act of accusation, me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons and to perceive in the absence of this portentous may have been (and she never adduced them, to charge or charges, whatever it or they were to be, me at least), she probably neither contemplated that every possible or impossible crime was ru- nor conceived to what she became the means of moured to supply its place, and taken for granted. conducting the father of her child, and the husband This could only occur in the case of a person very of her choice. much disliked, and I knew no remedy, having already used to their extent whatever little powers I might possess of pleasing in society. I had no party in fashion, though I was afterwards told that there was one-but it was not of my formation, nor did I then know of its existence-none in literature; and in politics I had voted with the Whigs, So much for "the general voice of his countrymen:" I will now speak of some in particular. In the beginning of the year 1817, an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, I believe. by Walter Scott,(1) doing great honour to him, and ¦ (1) See Quarterly Review, vol. xvi, p. 172.—E. tary" it has been; for who would dwell among a people entertaining strong hostility against him? How far it has been "selfish" has been already explained. I have now arrived at a passage describing me as having vented my "spleen against the lofty-minded and virtuous men," men "whose virtues few indeed can equal!” meaning, I humbly presume, the notorious triumvirate known by the name of "Lake Poets" in their aggregate capacity, and by Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, when taken singly. I wish to say a word or two upon the virtue of one of those persons, public and private, for reasons which will soon appear. no disgrace to me, though both poetically and per- Rome merely to show that the sentiment which I sonally more than sufficiently favourable to the have described was not confined to the English in work and the author of whom it treated. It was England, and as forming part of my answer to the written at a time when a selfish man would not, reproach cast upon what has been called my "selfand a timid one dared not have said a word in fa-ish exile," and my "voluntary exile." "Volunvour of either; it was written by one to whom temporary public opinion had elevated me to the rank of a rival-a proud distinction, and unmerited; but which has not prevented me from feeling as a friend, nor him from more than corresponding to that sentiment. The article in question was written upon the Third Canto of Childe Harold; and after many observations, which it would as ill become me to repeat as to forget, concluded with "a hope that I might yet return to England." How this expression was received in England itself I am not acquainted, but it gave great offence at Rome to the respectable ten or twenty thousand English travellers then and there assembled. I did not visit Rome till some time after, so that I had no opportunity of knowing the fact; but I was informed, long afterwards, that the greatest indignation had been manifested in the enlightened Anglo-circle of that year, which happened to comprise within it--amidst a considerable leaven of Welbeck Street and Devonshire Place, broken loose upon their travels-several really well-born and well-bred families, who did not the less participate in the feeling of the hour. "Why should he return to England?" was the general exclamation. I answer why? It is a ques- | tion I have occasionally asked myself, and I never yet could give it a satisfactory reply. I had then no thoughts of returning, and if I have any now, they are of business, and not of pleasure. Amidst the ties that have been dashed to pieces, there are links yet entire, though the chain itself be broken. There are duties, and connections, which may one day require my presence-and I am a father. have still some friends whom I wish to meet again, and it may be, an enemy. These things, and those minuter details of business, which time accumulates during absence, in every man's affairs and property, may, and probably will, recall me to England; but I shall return with the same feelings with which I left it, in respect to itself, though altered with regard to individuals, as I have been more or less informed of their conduct since my departure; for it was only a considerable time after it that I was made acquainted with the real facts and full extent of some of their proceedings and language. My friends, like other friends, from conciliatory motives, withheld from me much that they could, and some things which they should have unfolded; however, that which is deferred is not lost-but it has been no fault of mine that it has been deferred at all. I have alluded to what is said to have passed at When I left England in April, 1816, ill in mind, in body, and in circumstances, I took up my residence at Coligny, by the lake of Geneva. The sole companion of my journey was a young physician,(1) who had to make his way in the world, and, having geen very little of it, was naturally and laudably desirous of seeing more society than suited my present habits or my past experience. I therefore presented him to those gentlemen of Geneva for whom I had letters of introduction; and having thus seen him in a situation to make his own way, retired for my own part entirely from society, with the exception of one English family, living at about a quarter of a mile's distance from Diodati, and with the further exception of some occasional intercourse with Coppet, at the wish of Madame de Staël. The English family to which I allude consisted of two ladies, a gentleman, and his son, a boy of a year old.(2) One of "these lofty-minded and virtuous men," in the words of the Edinburgh Magazine, made, I understand, about this time, or soon after, a tour in Switzerland. On his return to England, he circulated—and for any thing I know, invented -a report, that the gentleman to whom I have alluded and myself were living in promiscuous intercourse with two sisters, "having formed a league of incest" (1 quote the words as they were stated to me), and indulged himselfon the natural comments upon such a conjunction, which are said to have been repeated publicly, with great complacency, by another of that poetical fraternity, of whom I shall say only, that even had the story been true, he should not have repeated it, as far as it regarded myself, except in sorrow. The tale itself requires (1) Dr. Polidori-author of the Vampire.-E. (2) Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, Miss Clermont, and Master Shelley. -F he and his sect are remembered, I shall be proud to be "forgot." That he is not content with his success as a poet may reasonably be believed-he has been the nine-pin of reviews; the Edinburgh knocked him down, and the Quarterly set him up; the government found him useful in the periodical but a world in answer-the ladies were not sisters, nor in any degree connected, except by the second marriage of their respective parents, a widower with a widow, both being the offspring of former marriages; neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years old. "Promiscuous intercourse" could hardly have disgusted the great patron of pantiso-line, and made a point of recommending his works cracy, (does Mr. Southey remember such a scheme?) but there was none. Of the "lofty-minded, virtuous" Wordsworth, one anecdote will suffice to speak his sincerity. In a conversation with Mr.➖➖upon poetry, he concluded with, "After all, I would not give five shil haps this calculation might rather show his esteem for five shillings than his low estimate of Dr. Southey; but considering that when he was in his need, and Southey had a shilling, Wordsworth is said to have had generally sixpence out of it, it has an awkward sound in the way of valuation. This anecdote was told me by persons who, if quoted by name, would prove that its genealogy is poetical as well as true. I can give my authority for this; and am ready to adduce it also for Mr. Southey's circulation of the falsehood before mentioned. to purchasers, so that he is occasionally bought mean his books, as well as the author), and may be How far this man, who, as author of Wat Tyler, found on the same shelf, if not upon the table, of has been proclaimed by the Lord Chancellor guilty most of the gentlemen employed in the different of a treasonable and blasphemous libel, and de-offices. With regard to his private virtues, I know nounced in the House of Commons, by the upright | nothing-of his principles, I have heard enough. and able member for Norwich, as a "rancorous As far as having been, to the best of my power, renegado," be fit for sitting as a judge upon others, benevolent to others, I do not fear the comparison; let others judge. He has said, that for this expres- and for the errors of the passions, was Mr. Southey sion "he brands William Smith on the forehead always so tranquil and stainless? Did he never as a calumniator," and that "the mark will out- covet his neighbour's wife? Did he never calumlast his epitaph." How long William Smith's niate his neighbour's wife's daughter, the offspring epitaph will last, and in what words it will be of her he coveted? So much for the apostle of written, I know not; but William Smith's words pantisocracy. form the epitaph itself of Robert Southey. He has written Wat Tyler, and taken the office of poet laureate he has, in the Life of Henry Kirke White, denominated reviewing "the ungentle craft," and has become a reviewer-he was one of the projec-lings for all that Southey has ever written." Pertors of a scheme, called "pantisocracy," for having all things, including women, in common, (query, common women?) and he sets up as a moralist-he denounced the battle of Blenheim, and he praised the battle of Waterloo-he loved Mary Wollstoneraft, and he tried to blast the character of her daughter (one of the young females mentioned)-he wrote treason, and serves the king-he was the butt of the Antijacobin, and he is the prop of the Quarterly Review; licking the hands that smote him, eating the bread of his enemies, and internally writhing beneath his own contempt,—he would fain conceal, under anonymous bluster, and a vain endeavour to obtain the esteem of others, after having for ever lost his own, his leprous sense of his own degradation. What is there in such a man to "envy ?" Who ever envied the envious? Is it his birth, his name, his fame, or his virtues, that I am to " envy?' I was born of the aristocracy, which he abhorred; and am sprung, by my mother, from the kings who preceded those whom he has hired himself to sing. It cannot, then, be his birth. As a poet, I have, for the past eight years, had nothing to apprehend from a competition; and for the future, "that life to come in every poet's creed," it is open to all. I will only remind Mr. Southey, in the words of a critic, who, if still living, would have annihilated Southey's literary existence now and hereafter, as the sworn foe of charlatans and impostors, from Macpherson downwards, that those dreams were Settle's once and Ogilby's;" and, for my own part, I assure him, that whenever Of Coleridge, I shall say nothing-why, he may divine. (1) I have said more of these people than I intended in this place, being somewhat stirred by the remarks which induced me to commence upon the topic. I see nothing in these men as poets, or as individuals-little in their talents, and less in their characters, to prevent honest men from expressing for them considerable contempt, in prose or rhyme, as it may happen. Mr. Southey has the Quarterly for his field of rejoinder, and Mr. Wordsworth his postscripts to Lyrical Ballads, where the two great instances of the sublime are taken from himself and Milton. "Over her own sweet voice the stockdove broods;" that is to say, she has the pleasure of listening to herself, in common with Mr. Wordsworth upon most of his public appearances. "What divinity doth hedge" these persons, that we should respect them? Is it Apollo? Are they not of those (1) See Moore's Life of Byron.-E. who called Dryden's Ode "a drunken song?" who have discovered that Gray's Elegy is full of faults (see Coleridge's Life, vol. i. note, for Wordsworth's kindness in pointing this out to him), and have published what is allowed to be the very worst prose that ever was written, to prove that Pope was no poet, and that William Wordsworth is? that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic. Warton and Churchill began it, having borrowed the hint probably from the heroes of the Dunciad, and their own internal conviction that their proper reputation can be as poets-he who, having no fault, has had REASON In other points, are they respectable, or respected? Is it on the open avowal of apostasy, on the patronage of government, that their claim is founded? Who is there who esteems those parri-nothing till the most perfect and harmonious of cides of their own principles? They are, in fact, well aware that the reward of their change has been any thing but honour. The times have preserved a respect for political consistency, and, even though changeable, honour the unchanged. Look at Moore: it will be long ere Southey meets with such a triumph in London as Moore met with in Dublin, even if the government subscribe for it, and set the money down to secret service. It was not less to the man than to the poet, to the tempted but unshaken patriot, to the not opulent but incorruptible fellow-citizen, that the warm-hearted Irish paid the proudest of tributes. Mr. Southey may applaud himself to the world, but he has his own heartiest contempt; and the fury with which he foams against all who stand in the phalanx which At the same time Mr. Southey was favouring the be forsook, is, as William Smith described it," the public with Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc, to the rancour of the renegado," the bad language of the great glory of the drama and epos. I beg parprostitute who stands at the corner of the street, don: Wat Tyler, with Peter Bell, was still in and showers her slang upon all, except those who MS., and it was not till after Mr. Southey had may have bestowed upon her her “little shilling.' received his Malmsey butt, and Mr. WordsHence his quarterly overflowings, political and worth(3) became qualified to gauge it, that the revoliterary, in what he has himself termed "the un-lutionary tragedy came before the public and the gentle craft," and his especial wrath against Mr. Court of Chancery. Wordsworth was peddling Leigh Hunt, notwithstanding that Hunt has done his lyrical ballads, and brooding a preface, to be more for Wordsworth's reputation, as a poet (such succeeded in due course by a postscript; both as it is), than all the Lakers could in their inter-couched in such prose as must give peculiar dechange of self-praises for the last twenty-five years. And here I wish to say a few words on the present state of English poetry. That this is the age of the decline of English poetry will be doubted by few who have calmly considered the subject. That there are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the fact, because it has been well said, that "next to him who forms the taste of his country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it." No one has ever denied genius to Marino,(1)| who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but Morning Post (an honour also claimed by Mr. Fitz(1) Tassoni was almost the only Italian poet of the era in which he flourished, who withstood the general corruption of taste introduced by Marino and his followers, and by the 'imitated imitators' of Lope de Vega; and he opened a new path, in which a crowd of pretenders have vainly endeavoured to follow him." Foscolo.-E. (2) The Loves of the Triangies, the joint production of Messrs Canning and Frere.-E. (5) "Goldsmith has anticipated the definition of the Lake poetry, as far as such things can be defined. "Gentlemen, the light to those who have read the prefaces of Pope and Dryden-scarcely less celebrated for the beauty of their prose, than for the charms of their verse. Wordsworth is the reverse of Molière's gentleman, who had been "talking prose all his life without knowing it;" for he thinks that he has been all his life writing both prose and verse, and neither of what he conceives to be such can be properly said to be either one or the other. Mr. Coleridge, the future vates, poet and seer of the present piece is not of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Didos in it; it is an historical description of na ture. I only beg you'll endeavour to make your souls in unison with mine, and hear with the same enthusiasm with which I have written." Would not this have made a proper proem to the Excursion, and the poet and his pedlar? It would have answered perfectly for that purpose, had it not unfortunately been written in good English. gerald, of the Rejected Addresses, who ultimate- such gibberish, written in all metres and in no language. Hunt. who had powers to have made the Story of Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius and his taste to some unintelligible notions of Wordsworth, which I defy him to explain. Moore has--But why continue?—All, with the exception of Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, who may be considered as having taken their station, will, by the blessing of God, survive their own reputation, without attaining any very extraordinary period of longevity Of course there must be a still further exception in favour of those who, having never obtained ans reputation at all, unless it be among provincial literati, and their own families, have none to lose, and of Moore, who, as the Burns of Ireland, possesses a fame which cannot be lost. ly prophesied the downfall of Bonaparte, to which he himself mainly contributed, by giving him the nickname of " the Corsican." was then employed | in predicating the damnation of Mr. Pitt, and the desolation of England, in the two very best copies of verses he ever wrote: to wit, the infernal eclogue of Fire. Famine, and Slaughter, and the Ode to the departing Year. These three personages. Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope; and respect them for it, as the only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to preserve. But they have been joined in it by those who have joined them in nothing else; by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole heterogeneous mass of living English The greater part of the poets mentioned, however, poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have have been able to gather together a few followers. proved their adherence; and by me, who have A paper of the Connoisseur says, that "it is obshamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved served by the French, that a cat, a priest, and an and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul, old woman, are sufficient to constitute a religious and hope to do so till my dying day. I would sect in England." The same number of animals. rather see all I have ever written lining the same with some difference in kind, will suffice for a If we take Sir George Beaumont intrunk in which I actually read the eleventh book poetical one. of a modern epic poem (1) at Malta, in 1811 (I opened stead of the priest, and Mr. Wordsworth for the old it to take out a change after the paroxysm of a ter-woman, we shall nearly complete the quota retian, in the absence of my servant, and found it quired; but I fear that Mr. Southey will but indiflined with the name of the maker, Eyre, Cockspur ferently represent the CAT, having shown himself Street, and with the epic poetry alluded to), than but too distinctly to be of a species to which that sacrifice what I firmly believe in as the Christianity noble creature is peculiarly hostile. of English poetry, the poetry of Pope. Nevertheless, I will not go so far as Wordsworth in his posteript, who pretends that no great poet But the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the Lakers, ever had immediate fame; which, being interand Hunt and his school, and every body else with their school, and even Moore without a school, and preted, means that William Wordsworth is not quite so much read by his contemporaries as might dilettanti lecturers at institutions, and elderly gentlemen who translate and imitate, and young ladies be desirable. This assertion is as false as it is who listen and repeat, baronets who draw indiffe-foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present rent frontispieces for bad poets, and noblemen who popularity : he recited,—and, without the strongest let them dine with them in the country, the small impression of the moment, who would have gotten body of the wits and the great body of the blues, have latterly united in a depreciation, of which their fathers would have been as much ashamed as their children will be. In the mean time, what have we got instead? The Lake school, which begun with an epic poem, written in six weeks" (so Joan of Are proclaimed herself), and finished with a bal-printing, depended upon his present popularity lad composed in twenty years, as Peter Bell's creator takes care to inform the few who will inquire. What have we got instead? A deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances, imitated from Scott and myself, who have both made the best of our bad materials and erroneous system. What have we got instead? Madoc, which is neither an epic nor any thing else; Thalaba, Kehama, Gebir, and the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius. Terence, Plautus, Lucretius. Horace, Virgil, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, the delight of their contemporaries. The very exTheocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were istence of a poet, previous to the invention of (1. Sir James Bland Burgess's Richard 1. and how often has it impaired his future fame? have come down to us. The reason is evident; Hardly ever. History informs us, that the best the most popular found the greatest number of transcribers for their MSS., and that the taste of their contemporaries was corrupt can hardly be avouched by the moderns, the mightiest of whom but barely approached them. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, were all the darling of the contemporary reader. Dante's poem was celebrated long before his death; and not long af |